Local GE engineer Loewen featured as Esquire's ‘Best and Brightest'

Friday

Robert Downey Jr. is on the cover of the December Esquire. But the real hero in the magazine's “Best and Brightest” issue is an engineer at GE Hitachi's Advanced Technology Center near Castle Hayne.

Robert Downey Jr. is on the cover of the December Esquire. However, the real hero inside the magazine's “Best and Brightest” issue is a chief consulting engineer at GE Hitachi's Advanced Technology Center near Castle Hayne.According to writer John R. Richardson, Eric P. Loewen of Hampstead is “the man who is going to save the world.”Esquire's editor-in-chief, David Granger, wrote in a separate editorial that Loewen “has landed on the answer to three of our nation's most pressing needs – sustainable sources of energy, significant carbon-emission reductions and disposal of toxic nuclear waste.”Loewen, Granger added, offers “reasons to believe that things actiually can get better.”It's not the first time that Loewen, 48, has been featured as one of Esquire's “Best and Brightest.” (The last was in 2005, a year before he and his family relocated to Southeastern North Carolina.)This time, however, the magazine is bringing the soft-spoken, bespectacled Colorado native some unaccustomed publicity. His alma mater, Western State College in Gunnison, Colo., has invited him to be its 2010 commencement speaker.When Loewen spoke to a teacher-training session Nov. 21 in Washington, D.C., the teachers stripped the Omni Sheraton's gift shop of Esquires and demanded his autograph.What makes Eric Loewen a wonder worker? It's a GE technology that he helped revive, called PRISM: the Power Reactor, Innovative Small Module.“It's different from reactors like the ones at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant,” Loewen said, sitting beside a whiteboard in a GE Hitachi conference room. “Most current reactors use water as a coolant. PRISM uses liquid sodium metal as its coolant.”But there's more. Spent nuclear fuel in conventional reactors will stay dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years. PRISM has the potential to reuse such nuclear waste – in effect, creating more fuel than it “burns.” The radioactive wastes that it does leave will remain hazardous for only 300 to 500 years, instead of ages, Loewen said, eliminating the need for large, costly and controversial storage vaults, like the one proposed at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.PRISM uses a “passive” safety system that doesn't require electricity to trigger.Water naturally corrodes and cracks metals over time, including reactor parts in which it comes in contact, he noted. By contrast, liquid sodium “is VERY compatible with stainless steel,” he said. Also, sodium transfers heat much more efficiently.With PRISM, existing uranium supplies and deposits could be stretched to last thousands of years. (By contrast, Richardson noted, existing petroleum supplies will be exhausted within 40 to 50 years, if current trends continue.)Unlike conventional power plants, nuclear reactors don't spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. CO2 is the primary “villain” contributing to global warming – one factor that's led some environmentalists such as Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, to rethink their opposition to nuclear power. GE Hitachi spokesmen say that one 622 megawatt PRISM power block – by replacing conventional power plants – would reduce as much annual greenhouse gas emissions as removing 200,000 cars from the road.“This is America's fast reactor,” Loewen said. All the technology, he added, comes from GE, nine associated U.S. corporations and from U.S. national laboratories across the country.Loewen quickly admits he didn't “invent” PRISM. Actually, the basic technology has been around for a long, long time. “America's first fast-reaction, sodium-cooled reactor went on line in the great state of Idaho on December 20, 1951,” he said. America's second nuclear submarine – the USS Seawolf, commissioned in 1957 – ran on a sodium-cooled reactor system.What Loewen did, first at the National Laboratories in Idaho and then at GE, was to write and speak on reviving the concept after years of neglect.Now, GE says it can construct a new PRISM reactor within 36 months. “What we just need to do is detailed design,” Loewen said.All this, however, depends on the U.S. government, which owns all the nation's nuclear fuel by law and licenses new nuclear plants. So far, the signs seem good, Loewen said. The Obama administration canceled funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has launched a blue-ribbon commission to study energy alternatives.For an engineering superhero, Loewen follows a mild-mannered lifestyle. He and his wife Jennifer are active at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Hampstead. The couple has two children: Zatha, a senior at Topsail High School, a homecoming queen who's earned two state titles in cross country; and Hans, a sophomore at Topsail High and a budding triathlon star. Also, the Loewens have taken in a number of foster children over the years.Asked about the Esquire profile, Loewen said Richardson got the science right but left out one key fact on his personal life: Jennifer's name. “My wife e-mailed him: ‘Apparently in a men's magazine, there's one four-letter word you can't use,' ” he said.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.